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The project that I related to the most would definitely have to be Matthew Eaton’s project about his fear of being judged. I don’t have the fear to the extent that he does, but I’m very close. I think what he did was great to try and get over his fear and I honestly wish I would have done something more similar to that for my project. I also think that Brittany May’s experiment was very personal and that she was really brave to get up and talk about something so personal to her. I think the projects that got to me the most were the ones that were more personal or the ones that I can relate to. There’s a real bravery in those presentations and I think the people who did presentations like that will be the ones who get the most out of the project. I wish I would have been there the first day of presentations. I think I probably would have changed my project a little bit to make it more personal and about an actual fear instead of a phobia.

The last post I published about my fear assignment I hadn’t conducted the experiment on the class, but my family, as an act of desperation since I had missed the first class we had set to present in. Luckily, I still got to present and I liked the reactions I got out of the class a lot more than what I got out of my family. While I was conducting the experiment, I was trying to pay attention to the reactions of everyone in class. As I was observing, I could see some of the classmate’s faces change as the slides went on. Some of them would look away, some would just make a disgusted face. When the video started playing, I liked the fact that almost everyone had a reaction to the spider video. Even though, the audio wasn’t working, I still got the reaction I was looking for. I saw a few people jump while the video was playing and almost everyone laughed at the end of it. I thought that was strange, because every time I had watched the video, I would scream when the spider jumped off the ceiling, but I would always be laughing by the end of it. Almost as if it were a nervous laugh. The reaction I got out of the class was a lot closer to what I was expecting.

I think the main thing that I would change would be the fact that I focused on phobias instead of true fears. I see my fears of spiders and heights as true fears, but they’re not the kind of fears that deeply effect you on a day to day basis. I feel like I would have gotten a lot more out of the experiment if I had.

When the rest of the class presented their projects, I unfortunately, was out of town and didn’t get to see everyone else’s projects. Hopefully when we come to class tomorrow, there will still be a few to go and I can present mine, but anyways, just in case that wasn’t possible, I did have my sisters and my mom watch the video I made for my project and observed their reactions to it. Basically what I did was pick pictures of common fears and phobias and put pictures of those to make people start to feel uncomfortable, hopefully. After the photos had finished, I put in two videos that stuck out in my mind for making me feel anxious or scared.
Since I wasn’t in class to present my project, I showed my mom and my sisters while we were out of town and I watched and recorded their reactions. For the images that were shown in the beginning, as I thought, there wasn’t much of a reaction. For the video’s at the end, the first video, which makes me scream every time I watch it, made all three of them jump. None of them screamed like I do, but none of them are scared of spiders either. None the less, I got a reaction out of them. While watching the second video, even though it was created to be humorous, when I saw it for the first time in the movie theatre, I remembered feeling anxious and like it was never going to end. I actually remember covering my eyes at one point. There wasn’t a real visual reaction out of them that I could see, but my younger sister, Erin, told me that she felt anxious while she was watching it too. She’s more fearful and tends to be scared of heights and things like I am, so she could relate to my feelings, but from my mom and my older sister, I just got laughing.
Over all, I didn’t get the reactions I was looking for when I set out to do the project. I honestly expected to get more of a reaction out of the second video, but I also think that because I was testing on such a small group that it affected the results a little bit.
Something that I would definitely change about the experiment would be the photos. I think I would take them out completely and do more videos. I think that I would use the element of surprise that came from the first video more throughout the entire video. I would also do more testing and editing to the video itself and make sure all of the sizes and everything match up with the different places I was planning to put it. When I played it in the quicktime player, it looked fine, but when I uploaded it into youtube, it looked terrible and was WAY too small.

What the bleep really did nothing for me until the end. I felt like when I was watching it, I wasn’t even really paying attention until the very end. At the beginning, was only the scientific part of it, I don’t understand any of that and don’t even necessarily care. As it went on and it started talking more about the way we see things and how we can control our moods and the way our days go, that’s when I started to get interested. I see how our thoughts change the way we feel every day. I can wake up and, some days, I just feel like nothing can go right when nothing has really gone wrong. From that point on, though, things go wrong right around every corner.

To me, fear is anything that gives you anxiety or makes you feel uncomfortable. As I get older, I see myself getting more and more fearful of things I used to think were fun. For example, I’m leaving out of state on Wednesday morning and we’re going on a plane. I’ve been worried about it for the past week and I used to get so excited to go out on the airplanes. Same with heights. It used to be no big deal for me, now if I ride roller coasters or anything like that, I have to close my eyes to get up that first hill. I think most of the things we say we’re scared of, are learned “habits” almost.
And then on the other hand, there are true fears. I would say, I only really have one true fear. Spiders. My fear of spiders holds me back from alot of things. We have an in ground pool in my backyard and spiders are constantly getting in it. Before I will get in, I go out and check to make sure there’s no spiders inside, then I’ll get in. If there are spiders, I’ll sit out for the day.
Our laundry room in our basement is FILLED with spiders. I wait to do laundry to the point where if I don’t do it, I will be wearing dirty clothes. It’s terrible. Even seeing someone else getting close to touching a spider feels like it’s a life or death type situation. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s real to me. Another example, in our backyard, we have a really nice, wood furnature set. When it starts getting cold outside and we close the pool up, we move the furnature into our garage. When my mom was going through and getting all of the cushions off of the furnature to bring into the house, there was a HUGE spider and it’s nest. At first, I didn’t see the spider, but I saw the nest. My mom almost put her hand right on it and I screamed at her like someone was standing behind her with a gun. It scared the straight shit out of her. She backed off from the stack of cushions and then we saw the spider. It was a pretty good size, like a quarter.
I’m not scared of other things like mice, rats, or snakes, just spiders. I feel like since thats my only real fear that I have it way worse than someone who is scared of multiple things. I won’t even get close enough to a spider to kill it. I feel like I have almost a radar for spiders. I can spot the tinyest spider, but I will never kill it. I would rather watch it for hours to make sure it doesn’t come close to me, than get close enough to kill it. It’s really a problem.
I feel like the only fear that I have that could potentially keep me from completing a project, would be my fear of public speaking. If it’s a group of people I’m comfortable with, than I have no problem, but the majority of the situations that I run into, I completely freak out. This class and my debate class in high school are the only times I have ever been comfortable talking in front of other people. Even calling out answers in class is a problem. I feel like most of my issue is that I’m scared to be wrong, and I’m scared of being judged. I really need to get over that. I just don’t know how to. It’s getting better though, thankfully.

I haven’t necessarily decided what my experiment is going to be, but I have a couple ideas. I think that the reactions that I’m going to get are similar to the reaction that I gave the first time I encountered it. The first one, I scream, every time, without fail. The second, isn’t necessarily made to be scary, but it gave me alot of anxiety while I saw it. I hope to get those same reactions.

Where to start with vision boards? I don’t think it really helped me much. I feel like I have a clear vision of what I want and how to get myself there and a vision board isn’t that extra push to get me there. I think if I used it for more basic things like to work out and stuff like that, it might help but for my long term goals, it wasn’t very much help. It was interesting, though, the way that it helped other people. It really helps show how differently people process information and what helps them.
Another thing, we started talking about the fear assignment. I’m really scared about it. I feel like every experiment I keep thinking of, I’m too scared to actually execute it. I have no idea what I’m going to do, it’s going to be interesting.